Goes far, but not all the way

In a weird twist, Antec has delivered a case that’s both full on features and lacking in some of the company’s staple design elements. Take, for example, the case’s built-in fan controller—or lack thereof. We’re used to being able to flick switches to independently control all of the fans within an Antec chassis, but after connecting a Molex to the provided circuit board in the Eleven Hundred—annoyance number one—we were displeased to find that the switch only turns the top 20cm fan’s blue LED on and off. You can’t physically adjust the speed of that or the case’s rear 12cm fan.

Let’s play a little game. We have three solid state drives—one each from Patriot, OCZ, and Intel. Two of them are powered by the ubiquitous SandForce SF-2281 controller, and the other marks the consumer debut of a new 6Gb/s SATA controller. Guess which drive has the new controller?

If you guessed the Intel drive, time for a spit-take. It’s the OCZ drive that’s got the new controller, and the Intel drive which is SandForce-powered. What in the name of the MLC gods is going on?

It feels like a scene out of some manner of satirical dark comedy. Medical professionals are increasingly requiring new patients to sign forms that purport to give the doctor copyright to any reviews that the patient may write online. If said doc disagrees with the content of a review for any reason, he or she can force the patient to remove it for breach of copyright. This shady trend is now the subject of a class action lawsuit against one over-zealous dentist.

Here at Maximum PC we appreciate quality. We love seeing top-notch products get the high scores and florid praises they've rightfully earned. It's not all smiles and sunshine in the testing labs, though. In fact, many of the products we've reviewed over the years are more Ass Kicked than Kick Ass. You know the Best of the Best? Well, these are the Worst of the Worst.

Nvidia is steadily filling in the gaps in its product line. Late last year, Nvidia had the GTX 460 768MB and GTX 460 1GB cards. The 1GB GTX 460 was effectively replaced at the $250-$270 price point by the GTX 560 Ti. Now the company is delivering the GTX 560, which will be priced from $199 - $220.

Unlike the GTX 460 768MB cards, which only offered a 192-bit memory bus, the GTX 560 supports a 256-bit wide bus. The Palit card is slightly unusual in supporting a 2GB frame buffer, but its specs are otherwise pretty stock. It’s not factory overclocked, but given the tweaking and streamlining that are part of the improvements of the GF114 (560) over the GF104 (460), we do expect some performance benefits. The GTX 560 does have eight fewer shader units than the GTX 560 Ti.

In case you missed it on Wednesday night, the embargo was lifted on early reviews for Research in Motion’s first tablet device, the BlackBerry PlayBook. A veritable flood of reviews hit the web for the device, which debuts on Tuesday, April 19 -- but it’s off to a bit of a rocky start so far.

If the SteelSeries 6Gv2 looks familiar to you, it’s probably because you’re already familiar with the 7G, SteelSeries’ flagship mechanical-key keyboard. SteelSeries didn’t update the 7G this year, and it’s still the company’s top-of-the-line model. The 6Gv2 is essentially a more aggressively priced (around $100, versus around $150) version of the same keyboard with a few features stripped out.

It’s recently become popular for major PC game releases to be accompanied by their own line of branded peripherals, custom designed by big-name peripheral makers like Razer and SteelSeries. Frequently, these products are no more than a reskinning of a popular model, as is the case with the Call of Duty: Black Ops Stealth Mouse, which is essentially a rebranded Cyborg R.A.T. Other times, the tie-in is more substantial, as with the SteelSeries WoW mice, which feature unique, game-inspired designs as well as features and software intended to help you play the game better.

So, when we got the complete set of StarCraft II custom peripherals in for testing from Razer, we were curious to see whether they would be more like the former or the latter scenario. What we found out was surprising.

There’s good news and bad news for Intel lovers. The bad news is for folks who just bought a motherboard using the LGA1156 socket: Yup, it’s obsolete already. The good news: The LGA1155 motherboards using Intel’s performance P67 chipset are swimming with improvements such as native SATA 6Gb/s support, front-panel USB 3.0 headers, and UEFI. The biggest change, of course, is support for Intel’s new line of Sandy Bridge CPUs. These second-generation Core ix processors are not only fast, they’re cheap and overclock like hell. To find a suitable home for your new Sandy Bridge chip, we gathered up boards from old foes MSI and Asus to see whose next-gen motherboard deserves the honor.

Hit the jump for the reviews and an exclusive video look at all the boards!